Malachy Sketch

I've been working on the same cat painting for nearly a month and I'm just not into it, so I thought I ought to do something a little different for a while. I'm going to try to do a large (16x24) acrylic portrait of my nephew, Malachy. This is the practice sketch I did last night to try to get a feel for the subject and composition. Since then I've done a charcoal rendering onto the gessoed canvas and, after I'm sure that I'm happy with the way that looks, I'll start painting over it. I've had very little success so far at painting good skin with acrylic, so this ought to be a great learning experience for me.